Conspiracy Theories

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CONSPIRACY THEORIES – CONTRAIL FORECAST CHARTS – CONTRAIL FORMATION – CONTRAILS CON-TRICK

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Conspiracy theories find menace in contrails

A new conspiracy theory sweeping the Internet and radio talk shows has set parts of the federal government on edge.

The theory: The white lines of condensed water vapor that jets leave in the sky, called contrails, are actually a toxic substance the government deliberately sprays on an unsuspecting populace.

Federal bureaucracies have gotten thousands of phone calls, e-mails and letters in recent years from people demanding to know what is being sprayed and why. Some of the missives are threatening.

It’s impossible to tell how many supporters these ideas have attracted, but the people who believe them say they’re tired of getting the brush-off from officials. And they’re tired of health problems they blame on “spraying.”

“This is blatant. This is in your face,” says Philip Marie Sr., a retired nuclear quality engineer from Bartlett, N.H., who says the sky above his quiet town is often crisscrossed with “spray” trails.

“No one will address it,” he says. “Everyone stonewalls this thing.”

The situation Marie and others describe is straight out of The X-Files. He and others report one day looking up at the sky and realizing that they were seeing abnormal contrails: contrails that lingered and spread into wispy clouds, multiple contrails arranged in tick-tack-toe-like grids or parallel lines, contrails being laid down by white planes without registration numbers.

Believers call these tracks “chemtrails.” They say they don’t know why the chemicals are being dropped, but that doesn’t stop them from speculating. Many guess that the federal government is trying to slow global warming with compounds that reflect sunlight into the sky. Some propose more ominous theories, such as a government campaign to weed out the old and sick.

Exasperated by persistent questions, the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration joined forces last fall to publish a fact sheet explaining the science of contrail formation. A few months earlier, the Air Force had put out its own fact sheet, which tries to refute its opponents’ arguments point by point.

“If you try to pin these people down and refute things, it’s, ‘Well, you’re just part of the conspiracy,’ ” says atmospheric scientist Patrick Minnis of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. “Logic is not exactly a real selling point for most of them.”

Nothing is “out there” except water vapor and ice crystals, say irritated scientists who study contrails. Some, such as Minnis, are outraged enough by the claims of chemtrail believers that they have trolled Internet chat rooms to correct misinformation or have gotten into arguments with callers.

“Conspiracy nonsense,” snorts Kenneth Sassen, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. “These things are at 30,000 to 40,000 feet in the atmosphere. They’re tiny particles of ice. They’re not going to affect anyone.”

The cloud-forming contrails that conspiracy theorists find so ominous are “perfectly natural,” Minnis says. The odd grid and parallel-line patterns are easily explained as contrails blown together by the wind, scientists say.

 CONTRAIL FORECAST CHARTS

http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/GLOBE/resources/activities/appleman_student.html

 CONTRAIL FORMATION

Normal contrails DO form in fairly high humidity. When formed in 100% humidity they will NEVER disappear. If the humidity of that particular stratospheric layer is REDUCED, then in exact proportion the life of that trail will be reduced. This CAN happen; the layer can be lifted from beneath by a rising CUMULUS cloud in the troposphere. But the typical way they disappear is that LOCAL to the trail, the humidity has already been increased by the processes forming the trail: over time the increased humidity “leaks” away from the locality by gaseous diffusion, allowing the trail (of ice crystals) to sublime back into water vapor. Otherwise generally over time, layers FALL, COOL, humidity rises, trails get bigger. 

CONTRAILS CON TRICK

There is a new and ominous controversy concerning aircraft contrails and their supposed ill-effects. People with little or no scientific understanding are whipping up a furore over – nothing. This tends to leave all the real ills of the world unattended, and let’s face it, those we know of already are too great and too many to be sufferable. But how much worse it is when the (already!) deluded dream up new imaginary ills! With too much on our plates already, we are forced to concern ourselves with additional spurious delusions which, if they were to be taken seriously, would diminish our capacity to adapt to change, and ultimately to survive the upcoming onslaught.

A typical passenger transport plane (medium haul) burns 30 tons of fuel and thus unloads 30 tons of ice and 20 tons of gaseous oxides (mostly carbon dioxide) into the stratosphere every trip it makes.

The troposphere contains about 80% of the atmosphere and is the part of the atmosphere in which we live, and make weather observations. In this layer, average temperatures decrease with height. This is known as adiabatic cooling, i.e. a change in temperature caused by a decrease in pressure. Even so, it is still more prone to vertical mixing by convective and turbulent transfer, than other parts of the atmosphere. These vertical motions and the abundance of water vapour make it the home of all important weather phenomena. It is turbulent and unstable because it is at its warmest at its base. The troposphere’s thermal profile is largely the result of the heating of the Earth’s surface by incoming solar radiation. Heat is then transferred up through the troposphere by a combination of convective and turbulent transfer.

This is in direct contrast with the stratosphere, where warming is the result of the direct absorption of solar radiation. It is at its coldest at its base, and is stable and non-turbulent. If you have ever observed (or been in) a house fire, and looked up at the ceiling of a room with a fire in it, there you can see that the behaviour of the air is similar: the hottest part of the fire is against the ceiling, and the layers of air beneath (at decreasing temperatures) are stratified and somewhat mysteriously stable.

The troposphere is around 16 km high at the equator, with the temperature at the tropopause around –80 °C. At the poles, the troposphere reaches a height of around 8 km, with the temperature of the tropopause around –40 °C in summer and –60 °C in winter.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/secondary/teachers/atmosphere.html

Annual passenger jet aircraft fuel consumption is estimated to be 300 million tons. That may seem a lot, but it’s a CUBE with sides a hundred yards long. in actual fact.

http://www.after-oil.co.uk/runways.htm

The weight of the atmosphere is 5.25 petatonnes.

http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/astron-2.htm#MA

One can see (using a quick calculation) that, as a proportion of the weight of the atmosphere, the burnt fuel comprises FIVE MILLIONTHS OF A PER CENT. It would take 200,000 years to half-fill the atmosphere with aircraft exhaust emissions at their present rate!

Now, the water, the gaseous oxides and sulphates may have a hardly appreciable effect on Global Warming (they are only 3.5% of anthropogenic combustion), but are as NOTHING when compared with the Earth’s volcanoes.

There are 1,500 active volcanoes on land and maybe TEN THOUSAND active volcanoes under the sea. Beneath are a few links:

http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4886
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/interior/volcanism.html
http://green.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/volcano-profile.html?source=G2308

The term “active” means “constantly emitting steam, gases, magma, and ash”. It is hard to quantify the total emitted by the land volcanoes, but let us assume they average a million tons of each per year. That will give us fifteen hundred million tons of steam, fifteen hundred million tons of gases, fifteen hundred million tons of magma, fifteen hundred million tons of ash.

“Hey”, you might say, “aren’t you making free with all those hundred millions of tons?” – and I would answer you thus: “A million tons of rock makes a cone 243 feet high. So I’m suggesting that the annual volcanic production of rock is equivalent to fifteen hundred of these rock cones. See what I mean?”

To put that estimate into perspective, the largest known eruption, Tambora, put 200 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in a single event!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A781715

Getting back to the point, it can be reasonably argued that contrails are at least FIFTEEN TIMES LESS IMPORTANT THAN VOLCANOES when it comes to having an effect on our atmosphere, whether warming it or cooling it…

So forget ALL of this bullfish about contrails/chemtrails. Yadda barium, yadda aluminum, yadda cooling, yadda dimming, yadda morgellons, yadda toxins……..You can bet your boots that anyone who advocates this idea is an ignorant dupe, with NO IDEA of the magnitude of the Earth and the events that truly moderate its climate.